Professor Jason Cong’s office on the campus of UCLA is full, but not cluttered; important, but not pretentious; functional, but not over-designed. A wall of bookshelves that overlooks the desk and conference table is filled with proceedings from probably every technical conference ever to approach the subject of programmable logic design. One gets the impression that Professor Cong has not only read them all, but also participated in the production of a good percentage of them.

There is nothing in particular here to tip the casual visitor that this is the dojo where much of the best technical talent in the FPGA design tools industry was trained. There are no signs or scoreboards proclaiming the number of graduates that are now working at companies like Altera, Xilinx, Cadence, Magma, Mentor and others. Their legacy can be felt here, though, in the new generation of students that are now studying, learning, and innovating -- working to earn their right to join the ranks of engineers that define the direction of this pivotal technology.

Jason was born and raised in China. From an early age, he had a gift and an enthusiasm for mathematics. In his native China, he was regularly winning math competitions, and through those competitions, he earned his first opportunity to visit the United States. In 1980, (shortly after China and the US normalized relationships in 1979), he was invited to travel to the US to compete in the International Math Olympics. Unfortunately, following the defection of a young tennis player, China closed the doors and called off all cultural exchanges so the trip was cancelled.

Jason attended the prestigious Peking University in 1981, where he studied computer science, but still maintained a strong interest in mathematics. Once China began allowing travel to the US again, Jason applied to several US universities for graduate studies and took a fellowship to study computer science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with Professor David Liu, where he earned his Masters degree and Ph.D. “David Liu was a perfect match for me,” comments Professor Cong. “He was looking for ways to apply combinatorial mathematics and was looking at VLSI design. I was extremely interested in discrete optimization algorithms like sorting and graph matching, which turned out to be very useful for the early work there.” [more]